42 - The rise of the vernaculars

Summary

Robert Burton's complaint in 1621 that he could find no publisher willing to print his mammoth book in Latin marks the achievement of a kind of revolution during the sixteenth century. As the result of a conscious campaign and numerous polemics, first developed in Italy, then continued in France, the results of which were simply transferred to England, the major vernacular languages of Western Europe had by that date effectively dislodged the monopoly held by Latin on all forms of serious, written or printed, enquiry. When, just a century earlier, intellectuals or scholars wished to address the widest audience of their peers, there was no choice about the language: Erasmus's Moriae encomium [Praise of folly] (1511), More's Utopia (1516), Polydore Vergil's Anglicae historiae libri XXVI (1534). But in 1614, Sir Walter Ralegh offered a far larger historical project to this wider public as The history of the world. In the same year, Professor Edward Brerewood published an equally ambitious project (on the very subject of vernacular languages and their relation to Latin): Enquiries touching the diversity of languages, and religions through the … world. And perhaps the most ambitious of all projects had earlier appeared in Sir Francis Bacon's The advancement of learning (1605). Both Brerewood's and Bacon's texts were subsequently translated into Latin – a sign of both the lost dominance and continued prestige of the ancient lingua franca.

The general history of this displacement has long been known, and its causes not far to seek: the rise of nation-states and consciously cultivated national literatures, the explosion of literacy made possible by print and mandated by Protestantism. The rise of vernaculars fits seamlessly into the story of our progressive modernity; it seldom detains us. But just what kind of, and how significant a, phenomenon this is might give us pause.